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Conference on Social Media Communication and Right-Wing Populisms in Latin America and Beyond

Recruiting Post-doc Fellows for the Centre for the Politics of Feelings

New study maps moral language on US presidential primary campaigns

Our vision

The Centre, housed at Senate House in Bloomsbury, at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, was created in September 2021.

The Centre for the Politics of Feelings is devoted to the interdisciplinary understanding of how emotions and feelings can be active causes but also targets of political behaviour in diverse socio-political contexts.

The Centre addresses from a multi-disciplinary perspective, how affect and emotions and their underlying neurophysiological mechanisms shape political behaviour in intricate couplings with rationality, as well as how politics shapes and exploits affect and emotions. The Centre represents a focused, timely and multidisciplinary endeavour to give a new answer to an age-old question:

What does it mean to be a political animal in the 21st century of 'emo-cratic' politics, alternative facts, social media, precarious health and populism?

The longer-term aim is for this academic Centre to become a world-leading hub for the continuing understanding of how reason and social passions, in their inextricable symbiosis, define our political engagement with the social world.

The Centre for the Politics of Feelings, funded by the NOMIS Foundation, is a partnership between the School of Advanced Study , the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Philosophy ,at University of London and the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University of London, and is directed by Professor Manos Tsakiris.

Latest Publications

Comparing the persuasiveness of role-playing large language models and human experts on polarized U.S. political issues

Advances in large language models (LLMs) could significantly disrupt political communication. In a large-scale pre-registered experiment (n = 4955), we prompted GPT-4 to generate persuasive messages impersonating the language and beliefs of U.S. political parties—a technique we term “partisan role-play”—and directly compared their persuasiveness to that of human persuasion experts. In aggregate, the persuasive impact of role-playing messages generated by GPT-4 was not significantly different from that of non-role-playing messages. However, the persuasive impact of GPT-4 rivaled, and on some issues exceeded, that of the human experts. Taken together, our findings suggest that—contrary to popular concern—instructing current LLMs to role-play as partisans offers limited persuasive advantage, but also that current LLMs can rival and even exceed the persuasiveness of human experts. These results potentially portend widespread adoption of AI tools by persuasion campaigns, with important implications for the role of AI in politics and democracy.

Hackenburg, K., Ibrahim, L., Tappin, B.M. et al. Comparing the persuasiveness of role-playing large language models and human experts on polarized U.S. political issues. AI & Soc (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02464-x